EDITOR’S PAGE

ALMOST 25 years ago, an artistic genius came to Dallas to open the Dallas Theater Center on New Year’s Eve 1959. He was Paul Baker, innovative director from Baylor and Trinity University, whose first show, Time and the River, was daz-zlingly inventive. He used multimedia effects before we had a name for them and gave Thomas Wolfe’s work a resonance we had never experienced before. He staged Hamlet with three different actors in the title role, exploring triple layers of character. He took As I Lay Dying to Paris.

But Dallas Theater Center (DTC), operating both as a performing company and as a master’s degree program in drama, became an ambiguous success. It was the master’s program that gave the Theater Center its unique character, but it was also the program that created a misunderstanding in the community.



THEATER CENTER WAS ’A MEDIEVAL GUILD’



With classes for graduate students and special programs for undergraduates of all ages, Paul Baker created a kind of “medie-val guild,” as actor Edward Herrmann called it, where everybody did everything: acting, directing, set designing and constructing, costuming and ticket selling. Herrmann (currently starring in the Broadway production of Plenty) says he learned every facet of theater during his three years at the Theater Center, including “sewing a mean doublet on the Singer industrial machine.”

In a recent interview in The New York Times, Herrmann called the Theater Center “a wonderful place to cut your teeth – you could make all sorts of mistakes, and it wouldn’t damage you irreparably like it would in New York.” That was the problem. Too often, performances at the Theater Center lacked a certain professional polish. Yet audiences flocked to every show. Paul Baker built a following for the Theater Center that remained loyal for more than two decades. He left last year in a storm of controversy that left the theater board exhausted, the acting company demoralized and the public still ready to subscribe to every season no matter what the critics said. Paul Baker has never been a man to be taken lightly.



NEW PARTNERS: SMU AND THEATER CENTER?



Now, Dallas Theater Center Board President Bill Custard, General Manager Al Milano and their compatriots must decide what the Theater Center will become during the next 20 years. They’ve engaged Michael Langham, head of the Juil-liard School’s Theater Center in New York and artistic chief of Ontario’s Stratford Shakespeare Festival, to help in the search for a new director. First, Langham needs to know how the Theater Center sees its mission in Dallas: As a classical repertory house, like the Guthrie in Minneapolis? As a laboratory for new plays? As a showcase for the latest from New York and London? Most important, will Dallas Theater Center continue to operate both as a school and as a performing company?

If the answer to the last question is “yes”, Langham and the search committee would do well to look closely at Jack Clay’s excellent drama program at SMU. For 16 years, Clay’s theater department has been churning out writing, acting and directing talent that’s had a major impact on Dallas theater and has also scored impressively in New York. In addition to running the drama program, Clay (recently named Meadows Distinguished Professor for 1983) started Stage #1 at the Greenville Avenue Theatre and brought new, serious plays to Dallas with quality productions. If the Theater Center wants to build on its well-established base in education and performance, an alliance with SMU, instead of Trinity University, might be the beginning of an answer. (Recently, the Dallas Theater Center board of directors voted to sever all ties with Trinity, and there seems to be a move in the direction of SMU.)

For all the stress and soul-searching at Dallas Theater Center, it hardly resembles an organization in trouble. Interim Artistic Director Mary Sue Jones got off to a shaky start last fall with The Three Musketeers, but A Murder Is Announced was the top-grossing play in the Theater Center’s history, and the rest of the season looks promising. Jones will have considerable say-so about next season, along with Langham.



WHAT ABOUT DTC BUYING THE ESQUIRE?



There’s new entrepreneurial energy at the Theater Center. In late May, DTC is bringing the national company of Amadeus to town for a week’s run at the Majestic. This month, DTC may book Cotton Patch Gospel, straight from a six-month run in Atlanta, into the auditorium at the Biblical Arts Center. There’s even talk of the Theater Center purchasing the Esquire Theatre and operating it as a second house. This is a remote idea at the moment; plans are under way to raise funds privately and through a citywide bond election to build a new theater next to the current Frank Lloyd Wright structure in Dean Park. But the Esquire could be acquired and remodeled at half the price of a new building, and there’s much to be said for saving money and the Esquire and doubling the action at the Theater Center all at once.

Paul Baker brought a dream to Dallas Theater Center and created a very special atmosphere that he was able to transplantwith great success to the Arts Magnet HighSchool. Now the Theater Center is growing in a new direction and, according toMilano, we can expect to see rapid movement during the next year and drasticchanges in the next three years. And Custard says, “We’ve made the commitmentto bring the highest [theater quality] possible to Dallas.” So far, all the vital signsbode well for those of us who love theaterand want to see exciting, satisfying workat Dallas Theater Center.